Minecraft

Minecraft is a game about breaking and placing blocks. At first, people built structures to protect against nocturnal monsters, but as the game grew players worked together to create wonderful, imaginative things.

Installation

Setup

Introduction

In the installation process the minecraft user and group is introduced. Establishing a Minecraft-specific user is recommended for security reasons. By running Minecraft under an unprivileged user account, anyone who successfully exploits your Minecraft server will only get access to that user account, and not yours.
However you may safely add your user to the minecraft group and add group write permission to the directory /srv/minecraft (default) to modify Minecraft server settings. Make sure that all files in the /srv/minecraft directory are either owned by the minecraft user, or that the user has by other means read and write permissions. The server will error out if it is unable to access certain files and might even have insufficient rights to write an according error message to the log.

The package provides a systemd service and timer to take automatic backups. By default the backups are located in the backup folder under the server root directory. Though to keep the disk footprint small only the 10 most recent backups are preserved (configurable via KEEP_BACKUPS). The related systemd files are minecraftd-backup.timer
and minecraftd-backup.service. They may easily be adapted to your liking, e.g. to follow a custom backup interval.

Starting the server

To start the server you may either use systemd or run it directly from the command line. Either way the server is encapsulated in a GNU Screen session which is owned by the minecraft user. Using systemd you may start and enable the included minecraftd.service. Alternatively run

# minecraftd start

Note: If you run the server for the first time an EULA file residing under /srv/minecraft/eula.txt gets created. You will need to edit this file to state that you have agreed to the contract in order to run the server.

Server management script

To easily control the server you may use the provided minecraftd script. It is capable of doing basic commands like start, stop, restart or attaching to the session with console. Moreover it may be used to display status information with status, backup the server world directory with backup, restore world data from backups with restore or run single commands in the server console with command do-something.

Note: Regarding the server console (reachable via minecraftd console), remember that you can exit any GNU screen session with ctrl+ad.

Tweaking

To tweak the default settings (e.g. the maximum RAM, number of threads etc.) edit the file /etc/conf.d/minecraft.

For example, more advanced users may wish enable IDLE_SERVER by setting it to true. This will enable the management script to suspend the server if no player was online for at least IDLE_IF_TIME (defaults to 20 minutes). When the server is suspended an idle_server will listen on the Minecraft port using ncat(1) (also called netcat or simply nc for short) and will immediately start the server at the first incoming connection. Though this obviously delays joining for the first time after suspension, it significantly decreases the CPU and memory usage leading to a more reasonably resource and power consumption.

Alternative servers

Spigot (respectively Craftbukkit)

Spigot is the most widely-used modded Minecraft server in the world, hence there is a spigotAUR package in the AUR. The spigot PKGBUILD builds on top of the files from the minecraft-serverAUR package. This means that the spigot server as well provides its own systemd unit files, spigot script and the corresponding script configuration file. The binary is called spigot and is capable of fulfilling the same commands as minecraftd and the configuration file resides under /etc/conf.d/spigot.

Be sure to read #Setup and replace minecraftd with spigot wherever you encounter it.

It is somewhat affiliated with Bukkit and has grown in popularity since Bukkit's demise.

Cuberite

Cuberite is a highly efficient and extensively moddable Minecraft server, written in C++ and Lua. It achieves much better performances than the vanilla Minecraft server, but is not fully compatible with the latest Minecraft client (some game aspects might be missing or not working).

Cuberite minecraft server can be installed as a cuberiteAUR package, which also provides a simple web interface by default at port 8080 with which most server operations can easily be done through the browser. The cuberite PKGBUILD as well builds on top of the files from the minecraft-serverAUR package. This means that the cuberite server provides its own systemd unit files, cuberite script and the corresponding script configuration file. The binary is called cuberite and is capable of fulfilling the same commands as minecraftd and the configuration file resides under /etc/conf.d/cuberite.

Be sure to read #Setup and replace minecraftd with cuberite wherever you encounter it.

Additional notes

There are several server wrappers available providing everything from automatic backup to managing dozens of servers in parallel, refer to Server Wrappers for more information. However the management script provided by the AUR packages should suffice most needs.

You might want to set up a systemd timer with e.g. mapper to generate periodic maps of your world.

Be sure to take periodic backups e.g. using the provided management script (see #Introduction) or plain rsync.

Minecraft mod launchers

You can launch Minecraft from different so called launchers that often include an array of mod packs to enhance one's gameplay and add mods.

Feed The Beast — Originated as a custom challenge map in Minecraft that made heavy use of multiple tech mods and evolved into a mod package launcher.

Other programs and editors

There are several programs and editors which can make your Minecraft experience a little easier to navigate. The most common of these programs are map generators. Using one of these programs will allow you to load up a Minecraft world file and render it as a 2D image, providing you with a top-down map of the world.

AMIDST (Advanced Minecraft Interface and Data/Structure Tracking) (amidstAUR) is a program that aids in the process of finding structures, biomes, and players in Minecraft worlds. It can draw the biomes of a world out and show where points of interest are likely to be by either giving it a seed, telling it to make a random seed, or having it read the seed from an existing world (in which case it can also show where players in that world are). The project has been forked in the past, of which the most notable one is "Amidst Exporter" (amidstexporterAUR) which includes a patch for calculating Ocean Monument locations in 1.8+ worlds.

Mapcrafter (mapcrafter-gitAUR) is a high performance Minecraft map renderer written in C++ which renders worlds to maps with an 3D-isometric perspective. You can view these maps in any webbrowser hence they are easily deployed on one's server. Mapcrafter has a simple configuration file format to specify worlds to render, different rendermodes such as day/night/cave and can also render worlds from different rotations.

Minutor (minutor-gitAUR) is a minimalistic map generator for Minecraft. You are provided with a simple GTK+ based interface for viewing your world. Several rendering modes are available, as well as custom coloring modes and the ability to slice through z-levels.

Troubleshooting

Minecraft server on ARM devices

Minecraft server should run without any issues on ARM devices with latest Java, such as jre10-openjdk-headless. However, if you encounter any issues, try using jdk-armAUR instead. Also consider #Cuberite server as an alternative.

Minecraft client and Wayland support

Wayland and other window managers are currently not supported with Minecraft, as Minecraft has the prerequisite of xorg-xrandr and should be opened with xorg.

Minecraft client or server does not start

It might be the problem with Java version. Java version 8 is guaranteed to work well in all cases.

Both Minecraft server and the actual game work perfectly fine with the latest version of Java, such as jre10-openjdk, but the Minecraft game launcher (and possibly all other mods) might only work with the Java version 8.